Posted on 06/17/2013 7:18:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
More people value individual liberty, but we might be losing the moral guardrails.
Are Americans becoming more libertarian on cultural issues? I see evidence that they are, in poll findings and election results on three unrelated issues: marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, and gun rights.
Start with pot. Last November voters in the states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana, by a margin of 55 to 45 percent in Colorado (more than Barack Obama’s margin in the state) and by 56 to 44 percent in Washington. In contrast, in 2010, California voters rejected legalization 53 to 47 percent. These results and poll data suggest a general movement toward legal marijuana.
State legislatures in Denver and Olympia have been grappling with regulatory legislation amid uncertainty over whether federal laws — and federal-law enforcers — override their state laws. But marijuana has already become effectively legal in many of the states that have reduced penalties for possession of small amounts or have legalized medical marijuana. You can easily find addresses and phone numbers of dispensaries on the Web.
Same-sex marriage, rejected in statewide votes between 1998 and 2008 and most recently in North Carolina in May 2012, was approved by voters in Maine and Maryland in November 2012, and voters then rejected a ban on it in Minnesota. Since then, legislators in Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island have voted to legalize same-sex marriage. A dozen states and the District of Columbia now have similar laws that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. I have yet to see signs of political backlash. Polls show that support for same-sex marriage is well nigh universal among young Americans, but it has also been rising among their elders.
To some it may seem odd to yoke marijuana and gay rights, generally thought of as causes of the Left, with gun rights, supported more by the political Right. Yet in all three cases, Americans have been moving toward greater liberty for the individual.
One landmark was the first law, passed in Florida in 1987, allowing ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons. Many, including me, thought that the result would be frequent shootouts in the streets. That hasn’t happened. Almost all ordinary citizens, we’ve learned, handle guns with appropriate restraint, as they do with the other potentially deadly weapon that people encounter every day, the automobile. Concealed-carry laws have spread to 40 states, with few ill effects. Politicians who opposed them initially, such as former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, have not sought their repeal.
In contrast, voters have reacted negatively to gun-control proposals, even after horrific events like the Newtown massacre. That was apparent in the Senate’s rejection of the Toomey-Manchin gun-registration bill.
What about the cultural issue that most pundits mention first, abortion? Attitudes have remained roughly the same: Most Americans think abortion should be, in Bill Clinton’s phrase, safe, legal, and rare. Young Americans, despite their libertarian leanings on same-sex marriage, are slightly less in favor of abortion rights than their elders are. They’ve seen sonograms, and all of them by definition owe their existence to a decision not to abort. And from the point of view of the unborn child, abortion is the opposite of liberating.
Back in the conformist America of the 1950s — a nation of greater income equality and stronger labor unions, as liberals like to point out — marijuana, homosexual acts, and abortion weren’t political issues. They were crimes. And opposition to gun-control measures in the 1950s and 1960s was much less widespread and vigorous than it is today.
Is this libertarian trend a good thing for the nation? Your answer will depend on your values.
I’m inclined to look favorably on it. I think the large majority of Americans can use marijuana and guns responsibly. Same-sex marriage can be seen as liberating, but it also includes an element of restraint. Abortions in fact have become more rare over a generation.
But I do see something to worry about. In his bestseller Coming Apart, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray shows that college-educated Americans have handled no-fault divorce and other liberating trends of the 1970s with self-restraint.
But at the bottom of the social scale, we have seen an unraveling, with out-of-wedlock births, continuing joblessness, lack of social connectedness, and less civic involvement.
In conformist America, the old prohibitions provided these people with guardrails, as the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger has written. In today’s more libertarian America, the guardrails may be gone.
— Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
You mean you're dumb enough to imagine you know what I have, based on an anonymous internet forum post.
Your posts are about as meaningless as they come.
It isn’t even clear what you are interested in or wanting to say about the thread topic.
You just sit that and pretend to not understand what you don’t like hearing. It puctuates your arguments appropriately.
You have to say something for people to be able to respond to it, you don’t say anything.
You're not rerplying to me because I didn't say anything. You're looking for an attack vector.
LOL, this is baffling.
Not all that smart, after all.
From surveying this thread I get the impression that ansel12 is giving off the clueless jokey vibe of a noob toker who has smoked up, and is disoriented with regard to linear thinking.
Not trying to be a buzz-killer, ansel, but the “high” will wear off.
LOL, so this is libertarianism.
This is what libertarianism really is...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3032604/posts
This too...
And sometimes this...
The LP? Not so much. It’d be great if they were, but they aren’t. This has been pointed out to you before. And, I have zero doubts you will now go off on some idiotic tangent to obfuscate the clarity of what I just said...
And... GO!!!
So libertarianism is against gay marriage, and drugs.
I guess we are all social conservatives now.
Great, we need to make sure that the GOP and conservatives and all elements of the right, all become more aggressively social conservative.
And most importantly judging by this thread, WE ALL AGREE THAT THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY NEEDS TO BE STOPPED AND CONDEMNED.
What’s to be gained by having “aggressively social conservatives” in the US Congress or Executive office?
As this thread points out, the politics of the libertarian party are taking hold among rinos and the young as America decays, we social conservatives need to fight that.
Libertarian Party Platform:
Throw open the borders completely; only a rare individual (terrorist, disease carrier etc.) can be kept from freedom of movement through “political boundaries”, eliminate the Border Patrol and INS.
Homosexuals; total freedom in the military, gay marriage, adoption, child custody and everything else.
Abortion; zero restrictions or impediments during the full 9 months.
Pornography; no restraint, no restrictions.
Drugs; Meth, Heroin, Crack, and anything new that science and marketers can come up with, zero restrictions.
Advertising those drugs, prostitution, and pornography; zero restrictions.
Military Strength; minimal capabilities.
No where in the FedCon does it give the FedGov the authority to run a drug war. Getting them out of the equation doesn't mean States can't enact their own bans, as with Texas dry Counties. It does mean that the GOP no longer gets to tell Mark Mcwire that his weight lifting supplements are legally equivalent to crack cocaine.
The LP is a tiny fraction of the problem. They are largely irrelevant in elections. What we should be focused on is the faction in the GOP bent on being "Democrat-lite" and expending government into areas it has no business being in the first place. Their capitulation on core principles has angered the voting Base enough that they stay home in sufficient numbers to give the victory to the Democrats.
Solidify the conservative base, around core beliefs and Constitutional limits on government that benefit us all, and the Dems would lose in land-slides...
And what enumerated power of Congress do you imagine these "aggressively social conservites" using to make that happen?
They represent libertarianism in America, and you claim that they are not, so they need to be stopped and their image and credibility destroyed.
By the way, your argument for gay marriage was pretty weak, telling people that they can have private internal religious beliefs while the left and the libertarians deliver gay marriage and polygamy to America and the military, is hardly a conservative position.
You are starting to sound like you agree with the libertarian party.
I'm sure they'd like to. But they no more represent the principles than McCain does conservative TEA Party issues.
...while the left and the libertarians deliver gay marriage and polygamy to America and the military...
How so? If the government doesn't HAVE that power, and no where in the Constitution does it give it to them, then how could such a thing as you state come to be?
Here's how... IT COULDN'T.
You are starting to sound ...
And here you go 'round your mulberry bush again. Go play in a nice busy intersection somewhere...
They represent libertarianism in America, and you claim that they are not libertarian, so they need to be stopped and their image and credibility destroyed.
I see, we stop gay marriage and polygamy by ending our conservative efforts to stop it, and we overcome the left and libertarian efforts to force the military and federal government to accept homosexuality and gay marriage and polygamy, by stopping our efforts to overcome it.
Like I said, your arguments to promote the left's politics are really lame.
Look. I know reasonable cognition is a major issue for you... But please try.
If the government has no say in who gets married, then you are free to follow your religions tenets. Period. No interference at all. They can't legalize gay marriages because they don't have that power. Period.
If you don't want to hire them, you don't have to. Freedom of association. If you don't want to sell groceries/automobiles/houses to them, then don't.
This is how it used to be and these issues NEVER came up. Society kept them in the closet via sheer peer pressure. But Noooo... You wanted LAWS to uphold YOUR religion. You ceded that power to a government that was never supposed to have it in the first place and now look what has happened.
You were warned. You failed. Now get out of the way so we can fix it.
I don’t understand your insistence that everyone is religious, or the same religion, your insistence that only a religion can decide who is married is bizarre in America, and which religion, the gay church, Islam?
The federal government has to decide which marriages it will recognize and it always has, the states also have to allow people to travel and relocate, and bring their children, and divorce and settle divorces in their states.
You seem to think that marriage doesn’t really exist at all, that it is just whatever people want to call it individually.
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